articulate successes
Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Wed, 24 Feb 1999 08:18:48 +0000
I guess this is pretty old hat but some Bananafish may
have missed it. It comes so hot on the tail of my 'articulate
failures' that I can't resist passing it on (from its original
appearance on the Hemingway list.)
Scottie B.
___________________________________________
'Philosophy and Literature Announces
Winners of the Fourth Bad Writing Contest (1998)
'We are pleased to announce winners of the fourth
Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the scholarly journal
Philosophy and Literature.
'The Bad Writing Contest celebrates the most stylistically
lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles
published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism,
fiction, departmental memos, etc. are not eligible, nor are
parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from serious, published
academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be
allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so
widespread.
'Two of the most popular and influential literary scholars
in the U.S. are among those who wrote winning entries in
the latest contest.
'Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor
of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University
of California at Berkeley, admired as perhaps "one of
the ten smartest people on the planet," wrote the sentence
that captured the contest's first prize.
Homi K. Bhabha, a leading voice in the fashionable academic
field of postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner.
"As usual," commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy
and Literature, "this year's winners were produced by
well-known, highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored
for years to write like this. That these scholars must know
what they are doing is indicated by the fact that
the winning entries were all published by distinguished
presses and academic journals."
'Professor Butler's first-prize sentence appears in
"Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,"
an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital
is understood to structure social relations in relatively
homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which
power relations are subject to repetition, convergence,
and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from
a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural
totalities as heoretical objects to one in which
the insights into the contingent possibility of structure
inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up
with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation
of power."
'Dutton remarked that "it's possibly the anxiety-inducing
obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges
of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as
"probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet."
'This year's second prize went to a sentence written by
Homi K. Bhabha, a professor of English at the University
of Chicago. It appears in The Location of Culture
(Routledge, 1994):
"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses
of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification,
pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities,
and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to
"normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of
splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of
its enunciatory modality."
'This prize-winning entry was nominated by John D. Peters
of the University of Iowa, who describes it as "quite splendid:
enunciatory modality, indeed!"
'Ed Lilley, an art historian at the University of Bristol
in the U.K., supplied a sentence by Steven Z. Levine from
an anthology entitled Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar"
(Princeton University Press, 1996):
"As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real
and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend
to the putative traces in Manet's work of "les noms du père,"
a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus
("Les Non-dupes errent"), a revised Freudian novella
of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates
(and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction
of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically
irreducible dyad of the mother and child."
The next round of the Bad Writing Contest, results to be
announced at the end of 1999, is now open. There is an endless ocean
of pretentious, turgid academic prose being added to daily, and
we'll continue to honor it.
Prof. Denis Dutton
Editor, Philosophy and Literature
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Phone: 011-643-348-7928
d.dutton@fina.canterbury.ac.nz
_________________________________________________